Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid material for forming a three-dimensional object and a material set for forming a three-dimensional object, and a three-dimensional object producing method and a three-dimensional object producing apparatus.
Description of the Related Art
In recent years, there have been increasing needs for small-lot production of complicated, fine three-dimensional objects. As the techniques for meeting these needs, a powder sintering method, a powder adhering method, etc. have been proposed (see, e.g., Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2000-328106, 2006-200030, and 2003-48253).
The powder sintering method is a method for forming a powder thin layer, irradiating the thin layer with laser light to form a thin sintered body, and repeating these steps to stack layers of thin sintered bodies over the thin sintered body sequentially to obtain a desired three-dimensional object. The powder adhering method is a method for hardening a powder thin layer with an adhesive material instead of by laser sintering in the powder sintering method, and stacking such hardened powder thin layers to obtain a desired three-dimensional object.
Proposed examples of the powder adhering method include a method for supplying an adhesive material to a powder thin layer by ink-jetting, a method for placing a powder material, which is a mixture of powder particles and adhesive particles, and delivering a binding agent to the powder material to dissolve and solidify the adhesive particles and produce a three-dimensional object (see JP-A No. 2004-330743), and a method for dissolving a powder material containing a base such as glass and ceramic and a hydrophobic resin coating the base with a resin coated with a hydrophobic solvent such as limonene and solidifying the powder material and the resin to produce a three-dimensional object (see JP-A No. 2005-297325).
However, inkjet supplying of the adhesive material may be accompanied by problems such as clogging of the nozzle heads used, limitations in the selection of adhesive materials that can be used, inefficiency due to large costs involved, etc.
The technique described in JP-A No. 2005-297325 has a risk that the limonene having a low volatility tends to remain in the three-dimensional object and reduces the strength of the three-dimensional object. Furthermore, lowly volatile solvents such as toluene are problematic in safety. Moreover, the powder material needs to be coated with the coating resin having a large coating film thickness (i.e., needs to be coated with a large amount of the coating resin) in order for the powder particles to be bound together at only the coating resin. This makes it impossible for the three-dimensional object to have a sufficient precision, or brings about a problem that the density of the base material in the three-dimensional object is low. Particularly, when the final goal of the three-dimensional object produced is a metal sintered body or a ceramic sintered body that needs a post-treatment such as dewaxing of the resin and sintering, the incapability of providing the base material at a sufficiently high density makes problems relating to the strength and precision of the sintered body outstanding.